Kafka’s Heater
a short story
by Angus Brownfield
***
Published By
Copyright © 2011 by Angus Brownfield
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KAFKA’S HEATER
Home alone Saturday night, I heard a voice.
The voice was too indistinct to make out the words, but it had the inflection of a radio announcer. At first it sounded as if it were coming from outside the cottage window to my left, but there was nothing out there except a fenced yard and an apple tree. Farther, yes, a row of shops, very nicely done in white with blue trim, facing the boulevard, but so late in the evening there was no one in them to play a radio.
I went out to the living room to see, had I left the television on? The cold linoleum made my toes curl, crossing the kitchen, but I didn’t need to go so far as the living room, it was dark as a tomb, except for the grid of light cast on the ceiling by the Venetian blinds.
In my bedroom an electric heater was humming, the way they do. I turned it off and listened, to see if the whir of its fan were masking the voice. In the sudden silence I heard nothing but the sizzle of car tires on the wet boulevard. But when I turned the heater on again, there was the voice.
—Fan harmonics, I said to myself. My nephew, who’s what you’d call a geek these days, told me about those.
But what if it’s not fan harmonics? What if, say, through the mysteries of radio waves traveling about the universe in all directions, the heater were capturing some and spitting them out again at a pitch my ears could hear but without a lot of oomph? I laid my book aside, sat perfectly still and listen for words.
I found concentrating on sounds, possibly human sounds, so frustrating I had to call on my best breathing practices to counter the tension. It paid off; after a while I caught a word: —Operate.
It didn’t repeat, so it wasn’t the heater itself creating the sound. I caught another word: —Sleepless. Then a third: —Yaya.
Now I knew there was a movie with yaya in the title—something about a yaya sisterhood, but I couldn’t remember the exact wording.
—Stop, I said to myself, that’s thinking, not listening.
Sunday night I moved the heater closer to me. Sitting in front of it was uncomfortable, so I turned it to the wall, and, to my surprise, it was easier to hear words. After minutes of breathing properly and emptying my mind, I distinctly heard, —Small, medium, large. At least it was coherent. More than that, it was concrete. It harkened back to my original theory, I was hearing a radio broadcast. Whatever they were selling during the commercial, it came in three sizes.
Which reminded me that, when I was in the fifth grade, I had a tiny battery-operated radio I would take to bed with me and, under the covers, move the tuner ever so slowly from one side of the dial to the other. Preachers were prominent on AM radio in those days. Once I tuned in a preacher who said he was broadcasting from Mexico. He talked about people imitating God by being creative. It was such a novel idea I told my father about it, though I risked revealing that I had listened to the radio when I was supposed to be sleeping.
He was sitting in our living room back in Iowa City, reading the evening paper the way he always did, sipping his highball, which I could smell when I approached him, even with the cigarette smoke.
—Young lady, he said, (I knew I was about to be dismissed; he only called me young lady when he didn’t care to talk with me) —Young lady, people aren’t supposed to imitate God, they’re supposed to imitate Christ, and so far as I know, Christ never painted a picture or wrote a book. Am I right?
—Yes, sir.
—And you’re not to listen to the radio in bed after lights out.
—Yes, sir.
That was one dismissal I didn’t forget. It set me to thinking about how a girl could imitate Christ. I read about people in New Mexico who lashed themselves with whips and carried crosses in procession on Good Friday, and I had this sudden flash of insight into those practices and almost fainted. I recovered, relieved to recollect that those so-called Penitentes were all men.
I finally had to get ready for bed. In the morning it’s off to work I go, selling gloves at Hobby’s Department Store. I braided my hair and put on my nightie, brushed my teeth and cold-creamed my face. I left the heater on but turned it down. I poured myself a brandy, my sleeping potion. I reminded myself how I hated to drink it after brushing my teeth—I can’t find an unflavored toothpaste—but what is one to do?
In bed I reached for my latest novel, about a woman caught in the Boxer Rebellion. She is rescued by a US Navy doctor who is the only officer left on the gunboat, Taipan, after the treacherous assault by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists. Unaccustomed to command, he must nonetheless direct the crew through one thousand miles of hostile country. He doesn’t have time for seduction, but he hardly needs it, as the woman is aroused by flying bullets.
It gets quite steamy in parts.
While I was reading, the heater said, —Yangtze. I sat up and listened, but it said no more. I told myself it was my imagination. After I turned the lights out and snuggled under the comforter, it said, —small dog, medium foo, large lion. I would swear on a stack of Bibles that’s what it said. It excited me so much I couldn’t get to sleep. I debated whether to take more brandy, but decided instead to turn off the heater, snuggle down again, and count backwards from one hundred.
It worked.
In the next two days the heater said in my presence, —Whirlpool of love; —among a young lady’s aspire; —fetid fetching firecracker. My first reaction? Gibberish. Except: while reading the romance about love on a gunboat, I had imagined myself in that situation. It would be less meaningful, even, than a cruise ship romance, just a lot of fear making a young lady’s heart aspire to being held in the arms of a unbendable man. Maybe a whirlpool of love was exactly what I aspired to, being swept away by powerful emotions, being crushed against a manly chest . . . oh, oh . . .
And yes, a love affair destined to end the moment the gunboat finished running the gauntlet could be thought of as a fetid, fetching firecracker: all fizzle and smell of gunpowder (is burnt gunpowder fetid?). Or perhaps fetid like a withered bouquet: no permanence.
The third day, rushing around, getting ready to dash out to the boulevard and catch the bus, I had this brilliant idea: record the heater. I had once aspired to be a writer, and I bought myself (out of money saved for a cruise I never went on) a tape recorder no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It came with a voice-activated feature. The heater h
ad a fan-only setting, which I turned on (not wanting to waste electricity and come home to a stuffy house) and set the recorder in front of it. I wasn’t sure the hum wouldn’t set it off, so I sat and watched it. Just to make sure, I put it in front of me at the distance it would be from the heater, and when I said, in a low voice, —Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, it recorded me. Satisfied, I set it back in front of the heater and dashed off to catch the bus.
When I got home that evening I rewound the recorder and listened. Nothing. I reasoned it was because the heat wasn’t on. Or maybe the voice would only talk to a person, not a recorder. Or maybe, like the preachers on my little radio, it came on only late at night.
I need to be careful about how much electricity I use. Mr. Lee, the landlord, lives in the house in front of the cottage. The cottage doesn’t have it’s own meter, so he charges me a fixed amount each month for electricity. (Garbage and water are free, he is proud to point out—as if it weren’t factored into the rent.) Each time the electric company raises its rates, he raises mine by the same percentage. Hobby’s Department Store didn’t raise my wages by that much, ever, which I told him once, trying to sound neither beggarly